REMARKABLE business, television. In an instant, it can turn Larry Flynt into Walter Cronkite while hoping that you either don’t notice or don’t care.

Last year, Matt Vasgersian was the host of “Sports Geniuses,” a since-canceled quiz show on Fox Sports Network that specialized in trying to lure a young male audience through sexual innuendo and in-yer-ear vulgarities.

Much of what “Sports Geniuses” featured is unprintable, but by way of example, a crude phrase for masturbation once served as a category title for famous infielders.

This was the show that found Fox Sports Net’s New York affiliates, MSG and FSN-NY, refusing to run its promos because of their shock-appeal content, including footage of wolves copulating.

In this endeavor, Vasgersian served as the smug point man, proud to exploit sports in TV’s unyielding effort to cash in by going lower than the previous low.

Apparently, Vasgersian’s shamelessness met with the approval of both Vince McMahon and NBC because early this year Vasgersian was named the lead play-by-play man of the XFL on NBC.

Vasgersian, during XFL telecasts, sat beside the pathetic Jesse Ventura, the governor of Minnesota who concocted, then advanced, hateful controversies in service to the XFL on NBC’s target audience: boys and young adult males.

From the start, Vasgersian did his best to do his worst on behalf of what McMahon and Dick Ebersol were selling. On opening night, in prime time on NBC, he referred to a deflected pass that was caught as “sloppy seconds.” Again, Vasgersian was eager to sell himself to a national audience as a haughty pig.

But now the XFL is defunct. Still, Vasgersian must’ve scored enough good soldier points with NBC not to have been forgotten.

And if you didn’t know what Vasgersian had been up to, how over the last two years he’d jumped head-first into the dumpster to dedicate his career to the advancement of social incivility through sports, you’d have thought that he was a serious, uncompromising and classically-trained newsman.

He read the scores and provided sports news Saturday with the sobriety and legitimacy of a righteous citizen steeped in the tenets of legitimate broadcast journalism. More than anything he’d done on TV the last two years, this was enough to make one ill.

Remarkable business, television. Were we supposed to have forgotten that Vasgersian had made his deal with the devil, or was this part of it?

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That Saturday’s Yanks-Marlins game wasn’t televised must’ve been comforting to Yankee radiocaster John Sterling. With no TV, no one could really tell if Sterling’s self-serving signature calls were accurate. Without TV, few would know that “It is high! . . . It is far! . . . ” is a description rooted in self-promotion as opposed to fact.

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Bill Pulsipher, the promising ex-Met starter and now a reliever with the Red Sox, proved a surprisingly good interview for WFAN’s Ed Coleman prior to Saturday’s Red Sox-Mets game.

When Coleman suggested that the media hype attached to Pulsipher’s arrival in 1995 put him at a disadvantage, Pulsipher dismissed the notion, saying that the media’s expectations weren’t nearly as great as those he held for himself.

He cited his immaturity during his four years with the Mets and said he wished it had turned out better but it was no one’s fault but his own. Good stuff.

George Steinbrenner and the Dolan Gang may not get along, but they share an understanding of the power of leverage. With Yankee TV rights, after this season, no longer belonging to Dolan-controlled Cablevision through MSG Network, the future of the Yanks on TV is all about leverage.

Thus, here’s a hypothetical scenario that wouldn’t surprise us if it turned to fact: The Dolans refuse to clear the new YankeeNets network on Cablevision systems unless Steinbrenner sells MSG at least one exclusive Yankee telecast per week, enough to sustain MSG as a subscriber and advertiser-attractive sports network throughout the summer.

Perhaps Cablevision will insist that Steinbrenner sell it the 50-game Yankee package that’s currently seen on Ch. 5, a deal that also expires after this season.

In other words, and we’ve seen similar from the Dolans in the past, unless Cablevision owns Yankee games, it can be expected to do whatever it takes to prevent Yankee games from being seen in Cablevision homes.